To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been reading this week:
In honor of Veteran’s Day here in the United States, I’m taking a break from recounting the best news stories I’ve read this week and using this space to honor journalists who cover armed conflicts, including journalists who’ve died this year.
According to the Committee to Project Journalists, 38 journalists have died so far in 2011. Eight were killed during crossfire or combat. The rest died while on dangerous assignments or were murdered. Most were killed in countries such as Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Afghanistan.
According to CPJ, 24 percent of journalists who died this year were print reporters, 21 percent each were broadcast journalists, camera operators or photographers, 16 percent columnists or commentators and the rest editors, reporters for online-only outlets or publishers (some had more than one job which is why the numbers don’t add up to 100 percent).
It’s one thing to devote yourself to your job – and a lot of journalists do. If you check out We Are Journalists, you’ll see plenty of first-person entries from reporters who’ve made the conscious decision to take a job that doesn’t pay well because they think what they’re doing matters. But it’s something else entirely to put your life on the line in pursuit of a story.
War correspondents take that to the nth degree, and for a reason. I was too young to understand much about the Vietnam War except that my dad was in the Army reserve during that time, my aunt’s future husband was serving and there were always news stories about it on TV. It wasn’t until I was older and read Dispatches, Michael Herr’s autobiographical account of the war did I gain a better understanding of what happened and what it must have been like to be there, as a soldier and a reporter.
As part of Portland’s Literary Arts lecture series, I’m going to see Sebastian Junger in February 2012. Junger is probably better known as the author of The Perfect Storm. But his latest book War (2010) and Restrepo, the documentary he made at the same time, cover the time he spent embedded with a platoon of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. I’ll blog about Junger’s talk here, as I’ve done with the other author talks I’ve been to in the series.
Do you have a favorite war correspondent, or war-time account written by a journalist? If so, leave it in a comment.
Barbara McDowell Whitt says
Richard Engel, now NBC News chief foreign correspondent, always impresses me with his willingness to put his own safety at risk in much of his reporting from the Middle East. I always breathe a sigh of relief when I see him back in the New York studio conversing with Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchor.
EP says
Very interesting thoughts. Living in Germany and watching German news, I have come to appretiate just how dangerous the work is that American journalists (and others) do. I don’t recall ever seeing a German journalist put himself/herself in a risky situation like that. They do good work and all, but it seems very second-hand at times compared to the stuff you wrote about. I often ask myself why they even go to the places they report from if they don’t ever get into the heat of the action.
I’ve never gotten around to reading Dispatches but I think I’m going to finally do so now.
Bob Gillen says
My favorite has always been Ernie Pyle from WWII. After following the war through Europe, he died in action in the Pacific.
I interviewed Lars Schwetje, combat video journalist, on my site at http://www.thefilmmakerlifestyle.com/The_Filmmaker_Lifestyle/Featured_storytellers.html.
Also just read “Waiting for Robert Capa”, a novelized story of the famous war photojournalist in his early days during the Spanish Civil war.
Finally, I read that Sebastian Junger won’t do any more combat journalism since his friend and partner Tim Hetherington was killed recently in combat.